Where Everyone’s A Minority
by Ron Stodghill and Amanda Bower
Time, August 2, 2002
Welcome to Sacramento, America’s most integrated city. What’s life like in this melting pot,
and why is there still racial tension?
Sequoia Way is easy for travelers to overlook. Nestled in the middle-class
neighborhood of Village Park on the south side of Sacramento, CA, it is an unremarkable
stretch of single-story frame houses. But if you stroll a bit along the winding road and visit
Sequoia Way’s residents, you will quickly realize there’s something extraordinary about this
street.
You will meet Tom and Debra Burruss, who moved onto the street a couple of years
ago. He’s black and she’s white, but on Sequoia the interracial union doesn’t stand out. The
Burrusses’ next-door neighbors are also minorities, a Vietnamese couple named Ken Wong
and Binh Lam. Living directly across are the Cardonas, a Hispanic-and-white couple, and
nearby are the Farrys, a Japanese-and-white pair. In fact, sprinkled throughout the street are
more flavors than you can get at Baskin-Robbins – Mexicans, African Americans, East
Indians, Asians, you name it.
Now head downtown to William Land Elementary School. Here the classrooms are so
ethnically diverse that teachers are considering switching from celebrating individual cultural
holidays, like Black History Month, Cinco de Mayo and Chinese New Year, to holding a
multiethnic festival. Of Land’s 347 kids, 189 speak a language other than English at home.
Immigrant parents are so common in Sacramento’s public schools that one child volunteered
that her father is also a foreigner – he’s from New York.
Or go over to Downtown Plaza mall and chat with teenage couples like Kayla, 17, and
Gerald, 18, Kayla’s mother is white, and her father is black; Gerald’s mother is Japanese, and
his dad is black. As they much pizza in a bustling food court as diverse as a U.N. cafeteria.
Kayla shrugs her shoulders at the notion of same-race friendships. “Personally, it doesn’t
mater what color you are,” she says. “I am mixed, he is mixed, and most everybody is mixed.”
So it goes in America’s most integrated city, as determined for Time by the Civil Rights
Project at Harvard University. In Sacramento everyone’s a minority – including whites. Of the
city’s inhabitants, 41% are non-Hispanic white, 15.5% are black, 22% are Hispanic and
17.5% are Asian/Pacific Islander. Although many cities are diverse (think New York City or
Los Angeles), in Sacramento people seem to live side by side more successfully. The city got
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that way thanks in part to affordable real estate for middle-class households (the black
population has dropped in the Bay Area but increased in Sacramento over the past 10 years)
as well as innovative housing programs for low-income families. In addition, stategovernment agencies and college campuses are sprinkled throughout the city, providing
stable, well-paid, equal-opportunity employment.
But while Sacramento approaches an ideal for integration, it certainly isn’t paradise.
Beneath the multicolored surface, the city’s 407,018 inhabitants vacillate between racial
harmony and ethnic tension. You see a Sikh casually strolling into a Mexican restaurant for
takeout, an Eskimo and a white punk hanging out together downtown. But you also see black
and Hispanic parents outraged because their kids’ test scores lag behind those of whites and
Asians in integrated schools. And you hear Anne Gayles-White, the N.A.A.C.P. chapter
president, saying “There’s still too much hatred and racism in a city like this.”
Sacramento’s Crayola culture is no statistical anomaly. Indeed, it may well be a sign of
the times. Non-Hispanic whites still account for 69% of the U.S. population and maintain a
predominant share of the nation’s fiscal and political power. But by 2059 at the latest,
according to U.S. Census figures, there will no longer be a white majority in America.
Sacramento, then, provides perhaps the clearest view into the nation’s future – a glimpse into
what our neighborhoods, schools, churches and police forces may look like just a few
decades from now.
70 Languages, One System
Three weeks ago, Yun Qian (Cindy) Zhong, a sixth-grader assigned to Randy Helms’
homeroom, walked into William Land Elementary School for the first time. She had all the
gifts of a model student – intelligence, friendliness and an eagerness to learn. There was just
one problem: Zhong, an immigrant from Canton, China, didn’t speak a word of English.
Helms didn’t panic. His students and their parents hail from as far away as Vietnam,
Mexico, Germany, Portugal, Panama and, fortunately, China. By the end of Zhong’s second
week, Helms, with help from the Cantonese-speaking students in his class, had taught Zhong
to count past 10 as well as to answer yes or no to questions translated for her.
A William Land education doesn’t come easy. The school is located in a poor
community downtown (90% of Land’s kids qualify for free lunch), the class (Helms alone
teaches 32 students) and language barriers are routine (many kids’ parents speak no
English). Kids are tested for English proficiency within 30 days of enrolling; most score from 1
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to 5 out of a maximum of 10. Across Sacramento, educators face similar challenges. How
does a school district of 53,400 students communicate with a parent group that speaks more
than 70 languages? And perhaps even more pressing, how much do cultural differences
contribute to the fact that Latino and African-American children do not perform as well on
standardized tests as white and Asian kids in the city’s integrated schools?
Take John F. Kennedy High School, which at first blush is a picture of integration, with
21% white students, 22% black, 35% Asian and 16% Latino (The remainder are primarily
Pacific Islanders, Filipinos and American Indians). J.F.K. routinely ships top graduates to Ivy
League schools. But while the typical Asian kid has a 3.01 grade-point average, AfricanAmerican kids score 1.85. What’s going on? School district superintendent Jim Sweeney
attributes the gap to class differences. J.F.K. students come from two neighborhoods – a
middle-class area known as the Pocket, and a low-income, predominately black and Hispanic
part of town called Meadoview. Lower-income parents, he says, are often less able to spend
time helping their kids with homework and encouraging them to learn. “Some surveys say
poor children actually hear a million less words a year in the formative years,” he says.
That explanation is too simplistic for Patricia Gandara, a University of California at
Davis professor of education and Sacramento resident. She believes that teachers and
administrators stereotype students on the basis of race. There are plenty of examples – from
the teacher who asked a Latino boy if his parents had jobs (his mother was a school
principal) to the Mexican child in an advanced-placement class who was asked whether she
was Asian (her classmates couldn’t imagine that a Latina could perform so well). “The
schools make assumptions along class lines about which parents care and which don’t, and
parents and children begin to read those signs very early,” Gandara says.
The district is making some progress in closing the gap. One effective method: home
visits, which foster a relationship between teachers and parents and encourage working
together to meet a child’s needs. Suggested by a parent in 1998, the program helped boost
reading scores in the district’s elementary schools 36% and math scores 73% (reading and
math scores are still only at the 46th and 59th national percentile, respectively).
Shades Of Blue
Cruising Del Paso Heights in an unmarked police car, Chou Vang, 33, gestures toward
a section of tired apartment houses and talks about gang violence. “Back in Laos, the Hmong
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are a minority ethnic group,” he explains, “and the ethnic Lao ruled and ran the country. They
have carried their old tensions to this country.”
Vang is a police officer with the Sacramento police department, assigned to the
problem-oriented policing unit. He is also a Laos-born member of the Hmong. The
combination – his cop instincts and Hmong sensibility – enables Vang to be an effective
negotiator in Hmong cases, including recurring episodes of gang violence between north-side
teens and another Hmong gang in the southern part of town. Vang works on cases of all
types, and frequently they involve drugs. In Del Paso Heights methamphetamines are the
drug of choice. In Sacramento just last week federal authorities indicted 10 people on
charges of importing yaba, a candy-flavored amphetamine.
The Sacramento police department has had difficulty attracting immigrant officers and
people of color. White men still make up 46% of the department’s staff; women swell the
Caucasian ranks to 70%. Hispanics of any race account for 12%, blacks 8% and Asians 8%.
Concern about racial profiling led the department to launch a study of its practices in 2000,
and its first report found that 27% of drivers stopped by police were African American
although African Americans make up only 15.5% of the local population. Despite such
controversies, Vang feels he made the right move in signing up. “Occasionally someone will
tell me to go back to my own country,” he said. “But for the most part, I don’t think they see
me as an Asian. They just see me as a police officer.”
All Of Me
When Mariko Ferronato was 3 years old, she would regularly quiz her mother about
which half of her was white and which was Japanese. “I thought there was a physical line that
divided the Japanese me from the Caucasian me,” says Ferronato, now 18 and a high school
senior. A soccer goalie who plays the violin and has her eye on pre-med studies, Ferronato
says her racial identity developed in stages. At her mostly white elementary school, she
considered herself a white person “who happened to eat a lot of sticky rice.” But in the ninth
grade at her diverse high school, another student, who is white, called her a “cheating Jap.” It
hit hard. “I then tried to focus primarily on my Japanese side, completely ignoring my white
side, as if to make up for all those years,” she says.
In the 2000 U.S. Census, 24 in 1,000 people said they were multiracial (it’s the first
time Census pollers asked the question). It’s often said with pride. While people of mixed
race were once portrayed as tragic figures in movies, such as 1934’s Imitation of Life, its
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1959 remake and 1960’s I Passed For White, today’s pop-culture scene is bursting with
mixed-race heroes, from movie tough guys Vin Diesel and The Rock to golfer Tiger Woods
and rising tennis star James Blake to singers like Alicia Keys and Norah Jones. Sacramento
is ahead of the curve; 2 of every 10 babies born here are multiracial. When those babies
grow up and start marrying – a national survey shows more than 90% of today’s teens
approve of interracial marriage – the numbers will climb even higher.
It took time – and a feeling of not quite belonging at an Asian students’ club – for
Ferronato to finally realize that she is neither Japanese nor white. She is both. “Now I believe
in the theory of hybrid vigor,” she says. “A specimen derived from two different species has
the strongest traits of both sides.”
But people are not plants, and theories are not proofs. Sacramento, as a city, is still
searching to find its best self, its strongest traits. Single-race parents of mixed-race children
can offer guidance to their kids but not always full understanding. Sacramento is on a similar,
unchaperoned journey. Will hybrid theory hold? Who can tell? But the blossoms will be
something to see.
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